Yeah. She was exactly like me and I didn't want to forget her. I wanted to know everything about her. I had an urge to peel back every layer and see what was underneath. To understand what had made her this way, what had broken her enough that she found beauty in decay and truth in death.
I wanted tokeepher.
The thought came as quick as a flash of lightning, my inner monster coming to the surface like it had found its mate. Mine. She was mine. I'd found her, recognized her, seen her for what she was, but now I couldn't unsee her. I couldn't let her just drive away and disappear into whatever nowhere she was heading.
I composed myself before I stood up so I didn’t just throw her over my shoulder and run off with her, and brushed off the dust off my jeans.
"You heading somewhere?"
"Nowhere specific."
Excellent. No destination meant no timeline. No one waiting for her and no one who'd miss her if she disappeared for a while.
"Good," I said. "Neither am I."
I turned and walked back to my car, feeling her eyes on me the whole way. I got inside the drivers seat and started the engine, letting it roar. I opened my window and looked at her one more time, memorizing the way she looked in the dying light, small and fierce, and completely unaware of what she'd just started.
"See you around, Roxy."
I drove off, but I didn't go far. Just far enough that she wouldn't see me when she got back on the road. I pulled off onto a side track, then killed the engine, and waited.
Ten minutes later, her van passed by, heading north. I waited another minute and then followed.
I knew what I was doing and I was aware that morally it was fucked up, that in the normal world it crossed about a dozen lines that other people didn't cross. But I'd stopped being normal a long time ago. Stopped pretending I operated by the same rules as everyone else. It’s too exhausting.
I'd grown up in a neighborhood in New York where savagery was currency and trust was a liability. It was where the strong survived and the weak got eaten alive. I'd learned early that the world didn't give a shit about fairness or justice or any of the other lies people told themselves to sleep at night. My mom was a drug addict and my dad was a long-time-serving convict who I’d never met, so I’d had to learn young how to survive. The world was brutal, harsh and completely indifferent to suffering.
And I'd learned to be the same way.
After witnessing my first murder at age ten, and then finding my mom dead from an overdose at fifteen, I had to find a way to stay alive and out of the system, so, I'd run with crews, done things that would make you shudder, hurt people who probably deserved it and some who didn't.
I left New York when I was eighteen as there was nothing keeping me there. No family or attachments.
I took a car from an acquaintance who owed me money, a black Chevy that he wasn't using. He didn't want to give it up, but I didn't ask. I just took the keys one day after he couldn't pay what he owed me. No registration in my name or paper trail, just wheels and a tank of gas and the ability to disappear. So I drove west with no plan.
It didn’t take long to find people to work for, bad people, and not the kind who talked tough in bars or sold dime bags on street corners. It was the kind who had money. Real money. They needed things done and didn't ask questions about how.
I started in Philadelphia first. Did a job for a man who ran loan operations out of a pawn shop who needed someone to track a debtor who'd skipped town. I followed him for three days, cataloged his movements, patterns, and where he slept. I reported back and then got paid in cash.
The man asked if I could do more than just watch. No problem.
Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Chicago. Detroit. Always moving, but always finding the same kind of work. Stalking people who needed to be found. Tracking movements for people who needed leverage. Hurting people when the job required it, like breaking fingers, ribs, whatever sent the right message. Intimidation and collections was the job that required someone who could read a situation instantly and didn't hesitate.
I was good at it. Better than good. I could walk into a room and know within thirty seconds who was dangerous. I could follow someone for days without them ever noticing, hurt people without flinching. I didn't feel fear or guilt, and that made me valuable and the money was substantial. Enough to disappear whenever I wanted.
It’s now six years later, and at the age of twenty-four I've learned that most people are weak, that they fold under pressure, and that their morals are just convenient fictions they abandon the second things get hard.
But I've also learned that I prefer being alone. That other people are needless accessories that cause issues. I'd rather spend time with the dead than the living because they don't maintain the mask of the living with lies and cheating. Instead they’re just gone, finished, stripped of all the bullshit that makes people unbearable.
Until her. She wasn't boring or predictable and she certainly wasn't weak.
She was the first person I'd ever met who looked at the world the same way I did, and from then on there was no going back.
I’m not following her because I’m bored or curious or even looking for a distraction. I’m following her because she’s the only real thing I've ever found. The only person worth knowing.
She just doesn't know it yet. But she will. I'll make sure of it.
I keep two miles back as her van winds through the darkness, the taillights disappearing and reappearing around curves. She has no idea I’m there. No idea that her entire life changed the moment she looked up from that sketchbook and saw me looking back.
